Dos and Don’t of Link Building

Link building can be a very repetitive task and it can be easy to fall into a routine of incorrectly generating links for your website. Google still considers link building to be one of the top three ranking factors, so ensuring you are executing it correctly is still vital for SEO today.

There are many things people do both correctly and incorrectly when it comes to link building, so we have created a list of dos and don’ts:

The Dos

Determine the value of the link

A great way to identify the value of a link for your website is to simply ask yourself a series of questions:

What kind of value the link will bring to your site?
Could this link provide your website with potential traffic?
Is this page relevant to your content?
Is this link authoritative?

Once you have worked out these options, you can begin to weigh up if this will be a worthwhile link.

Local listing

Local listings help your website to show Google that you are in fact at the address you state your company is. Through building local business citations you are providing Google with a series of consistent business information which can help to improve your ranking and authority.

Unlinked brand mentions

A great way to find potential links is through searching your own brand name, you will be able to identify what companies are mentioning your brand but are not yet linking to your site. You can then reach out to these websites and request a direct link to your website. This is one of the easiest way to get a link to your website.

Reclaiming broken links

This is another easy way to get a quick link back to your website with minimal effort. A broken link could be the cause of a company linking to an old page that no longer exists on your site. So it’s a great idea to resolve this broken link by providing the company with the updated page link to fix the 404 page error.

Create original content

Link building is nothing without great quality content. You will get more people accepting your link requests if the quality of your content is high and similarly the links will be more successful in not reducing to a high bounce rate if the content is relevant for the reader.

Outreach

A key part of link building is reaching out to websites to request that they link to your site. Although the response rate can be minimal, you can get a higher response rate if you are more strategic with what you say and who you reach out to.

The Don’ts

Don’t ask for specific anchor text

Asking for specific anchor text can appear like spam so it is advised to avoid doing this when outreaching to potential linkers.

Don’t buy or sell links

You can purchase and sell links that have a no-follow attached to it which shows that is has been paid for.

Hidden links

Hidden links on a page used to be a common thing to do, adding a white link onto a white background so that you are unable to see it. However Google is becoming increasingly clever in finding

Low-quality directory links

As well as high quality directories there are also low quality ones which is advisable to avoid, where they consists of multiple links and texts and other irrelevant links to your website.

Site-wide links

A site-wide link can be in the footer link or in the top-level navigation link but these site-wide links appear like spam to Google so it is advised to avoid these.

Abusing guest posting

Guest posting can provide great value if done in moderation, however you do not want to abuse this.

Link building is still a dominating part of SEO today and will continue this way in the future. To find out more about link building, contact us via our online contact form or give us a call on 02380 227117